I first became aware of the Chris McCandless story in 2002, when Jon Krakauer’s
book Into the Wild was being offered as an example of contemporary narrative
nonfiction in a literature course at the university where I worked at that
time. The book had been placed on Reserve in the Library, and I can remember
happening upon it and leafing through it pages idly for a moment, before
suddenly thinking to myself, with strange certainty, “I know why this guy
died.” At the time, I literally knew nothing more than that about the Chris McCandless
story.

A more comprehensive reading of the
book and further investigation into my initial sense of certainty about the
cause of McCandless’ death seemed to demonstrate that neither my initial
response, nor my certainty as to the cause of his death were unfounded.

I respectfully submit the results of
that investigation to this forum.

Vapniarca

The reason I felt that I knew what
had killed McCandless with such certainty had to do with the fact that I was
familiar with an otherwise obscure story of a concentration camp that had been
located in the then German-Romanian occupied region of Transnistria, in the
Ukraine, during the Second World War. The camp, known otherwise as “Vapniarca”
(a place name) was notable because it was the only camp during the entire
wartime period in which the inmates actually staged a food strike – and beyond
this – where such a strike was actually “successful.” The reasons underlying
the strike had to do with what was called “horse fodder,” or “pea fodder,” a
kind of plant that had been stored to feed to the horses belonging to the
Soviet Army’s animals. After the advancing Germans and their Romanian allies
had occupied the Ukraine, and when other food sources began to grow scarce,
these stores of the abandoned “pea fodder” were in turn given to the Jewish
inmates at the concentration camp at Vapniarca by the region’s conquerors.
Ostensibly, this fodder then became a food source for the prisoners to grind
into flour and bake into bread. Essentially, this was both a cruel experiment
and a death sentence, and the Jewish victims in time began to realize this.

Lathyrus Sativus

The Indian physician Charaka of
Triputa was the first to recognize it about 400 B.C., a plant that he called
“Kalayakhanj.” At about the same time the Greek physician Hippocrates mirrored
Charaka’s discovery when he observed, “all men and women of Aions who ate peas
continuously became impotent in the legs and that state persisted.” Centuries
later, the Bhave Pahesh, written in India in 1550, noted that, “Triputa pulse
caused men to become lame and crippled, and irritated the nerves.” By 1671 the
Duke of the German State of Wurtemberg had issued an edict that use of the
flour of the plant lathyrus sativus was prohibited from use in making bread
“because of its paralyzing effect on the legs.” By the early 1800’s, the
Spanish painter Franciso de Goya had produced an aquatint entitled “Thanks to
the grasspea” which depicts starving poor people eating a porridge made of
grasspea fodder, one of whom is lying on the floor before the group and who has
been crippled by the plant. In France, the consumption of lathyrus sativus was
banned by 1829, and in Algeria in 1881. The precise mechanism involved in the
crippling (especially among young males) by the legume was (and is) poorly
understood, and yet it had become recognized, as the years passed, as an
insidious and dangerous botanical killer. In fact, it was lathyrus sativus that
comprised the “horse fodder” which had been given to the inmates at Vapniarca
to bake into their bread allotments. What, exactly, is lathyrus sativus?
Essentially, it is a member of an ancient food source family known as “pulse”
crops which have been consumed as food by human beings for thousands of years.
(“Pulse” is a derivative of a Latin word meaning “thick soup.” It is thought
that the cultivation of pulse crops dates back for over 10,000 years).
Grasspea, or lathyrus sativus, is a high yielding, drought resistant legume
that occupies the same general family as soybeans, peas, and similar kinds of
plants that produce seeds that are rich in proteins and oils and which have
been an important source of food for both humans and animals for many
centuries. What is unusual about the grasspea, however, is that, under certain
conditions, it can not only be nourishing, but also dangerously toxic.

Lathyrism
at Vapniarca

Much of
what I learned about the internment camp Vapniarca came to me by way of
correspondence with the son of a Colonel Savin Motora, who was an
administrative official at the camp during World War Two. Motora’s son, (also
named Savin) now in his 80’s, is a resident of what is today Romania, and he
graciously sent me a great deal of printed information about his father and the
Vapniarca story that has been compiled by an agency of the Romanian government.
At Vapniarca, the Camp Commander, Ion Mergescu, along with the encouragement of
a German officer known only as Haupsturmfuher Kirdoff, recognized the “pea
fodder” as lathurus sativus. In what was little more than a crude experiment to
study the effects of the toxic legume upon a captive population on a mass
scale, they issued the decree that the fodder be turned into flour for the
prisoner’s bread. Very quickly, a Jewish doctor and inmate at the camp, Dr.
Arthur Kessler, understood what this implied, particularly when within months,
hundreds of the young male inmates of the camp began limping, and had begun to
use sticks as crutches to propel themselves about. In some cases inmates had
been rapidly reduced to crawling on their backsides to make their ways through
the compound. Kessler eventually approached Colonel Motora, whom he knew to be
sympathetic to the plight of Vapniarca’s prisoners, and confided his fears
about what he had deduced was the cynical and deliberate experiment in
poisoning and mass extinction. Kessler explained to Motora that once the
inmates had ingested enough of the culprit plant, is was as if a silent fire
had been lit within their bodies. There was no turning back from this fire –
once kindled, it would burn until the person who had eaten the grasspea would
ultimately be crippled, and in the most severe cases, die. The more they’d
eaten, the worse the consequences – but in any case, once the effects had
begun, there was simply no way to reverse them. Motora was genuinely horrified
by this news. As it turns out, Motora was one of those rare individuals who was
a truly selfless deus ex machina. Sensing the dangers of direct confrontation
over the affair with Mergescu, he set off north for a meeting with the overseer
and Governor of Transistria, one Gheorghe Alexianu. In his absence, Dr. Kessler
organized a strike among Vapniarca’s inmates, and they refused to eat any
further consignments of the dangerous “fodder” that was being given to them.
For a brief time, the camp entered into a state of virtual hell. Inmates were
punished, some by being suspended headfirst into deep holes, other by being
simply shot outright for their food strike. Yet they stood steadfast, and
continued to refuse to eat the suspect grasspea.

In his audience with Alexianu, Motora pointed out that the
inmates at Vapniarca were being cynically and deliberately fed a highly toxic
plant in a ghastly experiment. Probably he reminded Alexianu that the tides of
war were beginning to change and that it was only a matter of time before the
Russians advanced and overran them all. Already Nazi General Friedrich Von
Paulus had been surrounded and decimated at Stalingrad. With the Russians now
moving forward, the Axis armies in Transistria were beginning to feel like ants
on a hot plate. Soon enough, the Germans and their Romanian allies would be
pushed back across the Dniester River and down in to Romania proper. And
ultimately the war would end with Germany’s defeat. Then there would be
occupying forces and tribunals set up to consider wartime criminal acts.
Behaviors would be scrutinized, atrocities examined, and the worst offenders
shot or hung. Doubtless Motora reminded Alexianu that it would not be kindly
looked upon if the opposing Allies were to discover that the Governor of one of
the provinces administered under the Germans had deliberately been feeding poison
to camp inmates in some sort of hideous and malevolent research. Clearly
Alexianu understood the import of Motora’s point. He ordered that the feeding
of the “pea fodder” to the inmates at Vapniarca be stopped, and appointed
Motora to replace Mergescu as the commander of the camp. (It turned out to be
too little, too late. Alexianu was prosecuted at the end of the war for crimes
against humanity. He was condemned to death, and executed by firing squad on
the first of June in 1946 at the Fort Jilava Prison on the outskirts of
Bucharest.)

As for
Motora, although his subsequent service at the camp was relatively short, it
was benign and compassionate. In many camps, as the Russians advanced, the
remaining Germans and Romanians would execute the inmates wholesale before
retreating. For his part, Motora organized those inmates at Vapniarca who could
still walk and led them on a march back toward the Dniester River and the
relative safety of Romania proper. “Your job is not to guard them,” he told his
Romanian escort, “it is to protect them.” Along the way the column was
approached by a group of men on horseback called “Vlasovs” who were a renegade
group of Russians who had aligned themselves with the Germans. They lowered
machineguns on the column, crying out, “Jid Kaput.” Motora stood his ground.
Brandishing two pistols he declared that as a high ranking member of the Nazi
party, (which he was) he could command the Vlasovs to let the column pass. The
Vlasovs capitulated, and ultimately all of those marching under Motora’s
protection escaped and were spared. After the war Savin Motora was awarded the
highest honor bestowed by the State of Israel upon non-Jews, called the
“Righteous Among the Nations” award. It is estimated that Motora thus saved at
least half of the surviving ambulatory inmates of Vapniarca, over 500 human
lives. His name is inscribed upon the “Wall of Honor in the Garden of the
Righteous” at Yad Veshem, which is Israel’s national Holocaust memorial.

How Lathyrus Sativus
Kills

Even today, at this moment, lathyrus sativus is maiming,
crippling and killing. It is currently estimated that more than 100,000 people
worldwide are suffering from irreversible paralysis due to the consumption of
the plant. The disease is called, simply, neurolathyrism, or more commonly,
“lathryism.”One may wonder how this can be happening, and why it
continues to happen.

Dr.
Arthur Kessler, who was the Jewish physician who initially recognized the
sinister experiment that had been undertaken at Vapniarca, was one of those who
escaped death during those terrible times. He retired to Israel once the war
had ended and there established a clinic to care for, study, and attempt to
treat the numerous victims of lathyrism from Vapniarca, many of whom had also
relocated in Israel. It was through his efforts and those of fellow scientists
and physicians in a host of other countries that the exact nature of the toxin
in lathyrus satius was finally isolated. The scientific name for the neurotoxin
is “beta-N-oxalyl-L-alpha-beta-diaminoproprionic acid.”

Morecommonly, a simple acronym is used: “ODAP.” As in the cases
of rattlesnake and spider venom, and scorpions, wasps and bees, or the agents
in peanuts that cause anaphylaxis, the actor involved in the poisonings caused
by latnyrus sativus is a protein (not an alkaloid) toxin. This difference
between the two is not insignificant.

Typically,
if lathyrus sativus comprises about 30 percent of more of a person’s diet for
several months, lathyrism is inevitable. But in some cases, much smaller
amounts bring about the onset of paralysis in much shorter periods of time. Why
this occurs remains unclear.

The
core problem with the protein neurotoxin ODAP is that it affects different
people, different sexes, and even different age groups in different ways. It
even affects people within those age groups differently. As yet, there is no
explanation for this. The one constant about ODAP poisoning however, very
simply put, is this: those who will be hit the hardest are always young men between
the ages of 15 and 25 and who are essentially starving or ingesting very
limited calories, who have been engaged in heavy physical activity, who suffer
trace-element shortages from meager, unvaried diets, and consequently suffer
micro-nutrient deficiencies in zinc, copper, Vitamin C and Vitamin A. Why this
is so is not known, yet neither is it, particularly in the case of Christopher
McCandless, insignificant.

How
ODAP brings about paralysis is understood. Glutamic acid, an amino acid, is one
of the most common excitatory neuron-transmitters in the human body. The amino
acid acts as a chemical messenger between nerve cells, docking with the cells
and inciting the nerve to “fire” its electric impulse. Things called AMPA
receptors on individual nerves act a little like lightning rods, in that they
are primed to receive the prompt signals from glutamic acid, much as a
lightning rod is positioned to draw lightning. The protein in ODAP simply over
stimulates the AMPA sites. The nerves are then like lightning rods in the
middle of a lightning storm; they simply get overheated to the point of burning
out. They literally die. Once the AMPA receptors die, the nerve cell can no
longer receive the glutamic prompts to fire. If the process is repeated often
enough, and long enough, the entire system begins to fail. It isn’t clear why,
but the most vulnerable neurons to this catastrophic breakdown are the ones
that regula leg movement. When a neuron dies, it cannot be brought back to life
– regenerate. And when sufficient neurons die, paralysis sets in. With lathyrus
sativus the ODAP over stimulation never gets better; it always gets worse. The
signals get weaker and weaker until they simply cease altogether. The victim
experiences “much trouble, just to stand up.” Many become rapidly too weak to
walk. The only thing left for them to do at that point is to crawl.

At the
time of the publication of Into the Wild Jon Krakauer felt that McCandless had
mistaken two species of wild legumes called hedysarum alpinum and hedysarum mackenziei.
The former is believed to be harmless; the latter said to be toxic. Krakauer
first thought that McCandless had eaten the “toxic” plant erroneously. Later he
came to believe that he hadn’t mistaken them, but that the “harmless” alpinum
itself had concentrated toxins in its seeds, something which had heretofore
been unsuspected. Krakauer had sent samples of two plants, hedysarum alpinum
and hedysarum mackenziei to the University of Alaska to have them examined for
what he believed may have been the toxic agent that essentially killed Chris
McCandless by weakening him to the point that he could no longer hunt, forage
and, eventually, even walk. Krakauer felt that the toxin may have been
swainsonine, an alkaloid, the same toxic agent found in locoweed.

The
person who did the research was Edward Treadwell, who at the time was a
graduate student in the Chemistry Department of the University of Alaska. In
that study, Treadwell could find no evidence of an alkaloid toxin in either
species of the hedysarums. Later, in 2008, Treadwell and a colleague, Dr.
Thomas Clausen, again investigated the possibility of alkaloid toxins in both
plant species, and in an article which appeared in the Ethnobotany Journal
(vol. 6, 2008) after examining the roots, stems, leaves, flowers and seeds of
both hedysarum alpinum and hedysarum mackenziei, the pair again concluded that
no trace of an alkaloid toxin appeared in either plant species.

It is
extremely important, at this point, to note that the plants in question were
examined for an alkaloid toxin, but not a protein based one. With my
understanding of the protein toxin ODAP that is contained in lathyrus sativus,
and the hunch that this – rather than an alkaloid toxin – may have been at the
core of what befell Christopher McCandless, I emailed Dr. Treadwell.

Dr. Treadwell,Are you familiar with the toxic plant poisonings of the
forced labor camp prisoners at Vapniarca in 1943?

The reason for this question is
this: the toxin in the lathyrus sativus that was fed to the prisoners caused
severe crippling of the lower extremities of the victims. The plant, a legume –
also commonly called wild sweet pea or grasspea contains
beta-oxalyl-diaminoproprionic acid (beta-ODAP) as its toxic agent.Perhaps Jon Krakauer was mistaken when he speculated that
swainsonince was the toxic agent in hedysarum alpinum which was responsible for
the death of Christopher McCandless. Of course your research thus focused on
the plant looking for alkaloids, but might a toxic protein have in fact been a
contributing cause in McCandless’ death?

What gives rise to this question are
McCandless’ statements, “much trouble just to stand up”’ and “too weak to walk
out,” which rings strangely of paralysis of the lower extremities, or
lathyrism, which is what beta-ODAP, via lathyrus sativus causes.

In reading “Into the Wild” this
possibility comes to mind in a rather haunting way.

ICARDA (the International Center for
Agricultural Research in Dry Areas) estimates that over 100,000 people around
the world are currently permanently paralyzed to some degree because of
lathyrism.

Any further information you may wish
to provide would certainly be most welcome.

Dr.
Treadwell responded thusly:

Thank you for your
recent correspondence, and I am sorry that it has taken so long for me to
respond. I must admit that the presence of ODAP in the hedysarum seeds is
intriguing. I would have to say that it is a possibility. All of my work was
done on extracts of the hedysarum plants (roots, leaves, stems), where the
plant material was soaked in some organic solvent to extract the organic
compounds from the solid material, which was then discarded. (Much like making
tea – the water seeps into the tea bag and brings out the “tea flavor” from
it). Although I do not know this for sure, ODAP probably isn’t very soluble in
organic solvents and hence might have remained with the rest of the solid
material.

Second, the “tests” I used for
alkaloids basically consisted of spraying a TLC plate of the extract with
reagents that turn colors on a plate when they react with an alkaloid. Once
again, ODAP being an amino acid, it might not have behaved like most alkaloids.

Something that is outside of my area
but is certainly pertinent is the relationship between the genus lathyrus and
the genus hedysarum. Usually the more exotic secondary metabolites occur in
only a limited number of genera that are closely related. The closer lathyrus
is to hedysarum, the more likely this hypothesis. (The fact that they both
belong to the same family isn’t all that helpful, given the immense size of the
family Fabaceae.)All told, I am not sure if this is a very satisfactory
response, as I cannot definitively state that hedysarum alpinum and/or
mackenziei contain /do not contain ODAP.

It is possible.

It
wasn’t until 1962 that the toxic protein in lathyrus sativus was finally
isolated and identified. The food value of the plant runs at over 28 percent.
That’s twice as much as wheat. It can be three times as productive as soybeans
per acre. It will still be standing two months after wheat has grown a mere
four inches, shriveled for lack of rain, and died. Lathyrus sativus smothers
out all competing weeds. In certain situations it is a cheaper and better
source of protein than rice, fish, wheat, soybeans or maize. Napoleon had
problems with lathyrus sativus when it was fed to his horses. In 1972 in China
and in the late 70’s in Bangladesh, tens of thousands of humans were
permanently disabled, most of them left quadriplegic, the silent fires burning
in their nerve ganglia.

By the
early 1990’s, Canadian scientists in Manitoba had genetically engineered hybrid
lathyrus sativus plants that contained less than .2% of the toxic ODAP, yet
still retained the qualities of drought resistance, vigor, saturation tolerance
and fertility. Efforts to refine a toxin-free strain of lathyrus sativus
continued. In the late 1990’s, after 15 years of work and more than a million
dollars of research, the Syrian scientist Ali Abd El-Moniem, working in Aleppo,
developed a strain that is virtually toxin free. The International Center for
Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) receives funding for such
continuing efforts from the United Kingdom’s Department for International
Development and from donors to the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research, which is a consortium of international agencies that
works collectively to protect the environment, reduce poverty in developing
countries, and to support research into agricultural productivity.

And yet
hundreds of thousands continue to be crippled and to die in a “silent” epidemic
that almost none of the rest of the world knows about. Why? In many places on
the planet where the legume thrives, populations are increasing by three
percent each year, but agricultural production by only seven tenths of one
percent. In these places there are no serviceable feeder roads and virtually no
other supportive infrastructures. There is no exchange of information.
Marketplaces are rural and isolated, limiting the exchange of goods, services,
and supplies. There are few schools, and fewer still that teach about local
agricultural products The relief efforts tend to be lost in all the
intertwining agencies and complexities. There are not enough services because
in some cases there aren’t enough healthy people to provide them. There are not
enough teachers, enough agronomists, enough economic specialists, sociologists,
anthropologists, or linguists. Unfortunately, lathyrism continues to be a very
“low profile” affliction of the human race. This fact does not lessen the
tragedy – in fact only heightens it.

ODAP and the Hedysarums

Emboldened by my hunch, as well as the response from Dr.
Treadwell, I approached the chair of the Chemistry research laboratories of my
university. He and other individuals there were intrigued enough to look into
the possibility that one of the major contributing factors in the death of
Chris McCandless might actually have been lathyrism, through the agent of the
protein toxin ODAP. What follows are, in part, the results of that study:

“The
seeds and roots of both hedysarum alpinum and hedysarum mackeniei were obtained
from the Arctic Alpine Seed Company in Marsh Lake, Yukon, by the Chemistry
Department of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Samples of pure ODAP as
well as the plant lathyrus sativus were also obtained from Dr. S.L.N. Rao, in
New Delhi, India, whose ongoing research into the horrors of lathyrism
poisoning had been underway for many years. Dr. Rao’s lathyrus plants were of
the variety that contained extremely high levels of the ODAP toxin. These
samples would serve in base line comparisons.

To
consolidate the research, consistent footprints for ODAP were first established
on silicon test plates. The plants involved were all first frozen in liquid
nitrogen. After this, each was ground into a fine powder. The powder was then
placed into micro-centrifuge tubes and mixed with a solution of ethanol. Then,
after being refrigerated for 20 hours, the assorted powders were spun on a
centrifuge to separate a solid pellet from the liquid extract. The liquid yet
remaining was spotted across the bottom two centimeters of a silicon test
plate, and the plate placed into a glass tank to minimize evaporation or
contamination. Capillary action next drew the liquid slowly up the plate until,
after a pre-determined time, the assorted substances established their
respective protein footprints. (In this case, ‘footprint’ refers to a
purplish-colored circle of the extracted substances that appears at a certain
height on the plate. Different substances travel up the plate at different
rates. Thus, the presence of circles in the same area of the plate indicates
that the same substance is also appearing).

After
the plate was placed in a dehumidifying hood for drying, it was sprayed with
the anhydrous solution ninhydrin to bring out the color of the specific
markers. The results were then ready to be viewed.

A
number of proteins were tested for the sake of comparison, including (in
addition to the purified ODAP and the lathyrus sativus extracts,) substances
such as arginine, isoleucine, praline, tryptophan, glycine, valine, and for
purposes of balance, legume family members which are known to be non toxic
(such as common Wando garden peas).

The
tests were repeated many times to ensure the consistency of the results, and
when they displayed uniformity in their results, the conclusions are as
follows:

Neither
the roots of the hedysarum alpinum nor the hedysarum mackenziei indicated the
presences of ODAP. However, both the seeds of the alpinum and the mackenziei
indeed tested positive for ODAP. In fact, the seeds of both of the hedysarum
plants showed even higher concentrations of the deadly protein toxin ODAP than
was contained in the tissues and fibers of the lathyrus sativus plant itself.
Only purified ODAP showed a higher concentration of the toxin. But the fact
remains: not the roots, but the seeds of both hedysarum alpinum and hedysarum
mackenziei actually contain higher concentrations of the toxic protein ODAP
than were contained in the test samples of the lathyrus sativus. Probably, as
is the classic case in nature, as the growing season had progressed from July
into August in 1992 in Alaska, both plants had begun to concentrate more and more of their poisonous products into their seeds
to discourage potential predators.”

It seems important to mention here that although the roots
of the alpinum plant have been consistently reported as safe to eat, and that
it is dangerous to confuse it with the mackenziei and to avoid eating the latter
altogether, at no point has any mention been made that the seeds of the alpinum
might be toxic. It’s difficult to explain why, other than to speculate that
either the Native Americans, foragers, survivalists and botanists have tended
not to eat (or test) the seeds at all, or possibly tested the seeds at times of
the year before they had grown highly toxic, or else had been able to
supplement their diets with enough other sources of nutritious provisions to
basically counteract the effect of the seeds in question. (It takes five to six
weeks for the toxin to begin to exhibit its effect, and then only when the
seeds have been the principle food source in an individual’s diet). A number of
factors, in other words, could have come into play. But the bottom line is that
until the experiments conducted on the alpinum and mackenzeiei seeds, it had
never before been known that the seeds of both hedysarum species contained an
accumulative toxin.

The conclusion in this seems apparent: Christopher
McCandless had contracted lathyrism. Whether or not he had confused “safe”
hedysarum alpinum with its reportedly toxic cousin hedysarum mackenziei is
moot. Instead, he managed to find himself at the nexus point of every line for
those destined – or doomed – to be most affected by ODAP poisoning, and the
results for him of eating the hedysarum alpinum seeds were inevitable. He was a
young, thin man in his early 20’s, experiencing an extremely meager diet that
was deficient in specific trace elements and vitamins such as vitamin C, A, and
magnesium; who was hunting, hiking, climbing, leading life at its physical
extremes, and who had begun to eat massive amounts of seeds containing a toxic
protein. A toxin that targets persons exhibiting and experiencing precisely
those characteristics and conditions, and which is found in even larger
quantities in the seeds of hedysarum alpinum than it its notorious and deadly
cousin, lathyrus sativus. For Chris, the result seems to have been forgone. And
disastrous.

It
might be said that Christopher McCandless did indeed starve to death in the
Alaskan wild, but this only because he’d been poisoned, and the poison had
rendered him too weak to move about, to hunt or forage, and, toward the end,
“extremely weak,” “too weak to walk out,” and, having “much trouble just to
stand up.” He wasn’t truly starving in the most technical sense of that
condition. He’d simply become slowly paralyzed. And it wasn’t arrogance that
had killed him, it was ignorance. Also, it was ignorance which must be forgiven,
for the facts underlying his death were to remain unrecognized to all,
scientists and lay people alike, literally for decades. Under the proper
circumstances, in other words, the seeds of hedysarum alpinum cause lathyrism,
a crippling and commonly deadly disease.

Chris
McCandless seems to have sensed what was happening to him without understanding
precisely how or why. What brought about his death was lathyrism, induced by
the ingestion of the toxic protein agent called ODAP.

Hopefully,
to his thousands of advocates and admirers, there is now provided some measure
of final resolution as to this young man’s demise in the wild.

Note: I humbly harbor hopes that this information, coupled
with the death of Christopher McCandless, might in some ways be put to positive
use both to publicize and address the ongoing problems that the affliction of
lathyrism is posing to hundreds of thousands of individuals in the poorer
nations of the earth.

I am retired staff member of the Indiana University of
Pennsylvania, and a published author. I have won numerous awards for fiction,
nonfiction and poetry including: The O. Henry Award, the Golden Quill Award and
the Westmoreland Award. I am the co-editor of a textbook series for gifted
Korean schoolchildren that was funded and published by the Government of South
Korea and a published book The Seventy Seven Year Good Deed. I have a second
book, Jeff and Jimmy: A Vietnam Epistolary currently in preparation for
publication.

I have
participated in triathlons and distance foot running races and have performed
as a multi-instrumentalist in a Scottish and Irish traditional folk music band
for over 30 years.

6 comments:

Thank you very much for this post.For me it is very important this information over the years, many people have criticized Chris, they were saying it was a childish person who knew nothing about mountains.I've always admired the ability to chris and I hope that this new information will keep the respect it deserves.

"Ron Hamilton, Circulation/ILL Department, received the June 2003 Westmoreland Award in the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Short Story and Poetry Competition for his poem, “Burying a Dog During Midlife”. In May, Ron was the recipient of the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania’s Golden Quill Award for his article/essay on Ligonier Valley foxhunting, “Running Red” in the September/November 2002 issue of Westsylvania Magazine."

There is no record of him among the O.Henry Award winners dating back to 1919 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Henry_Award), but he could be referring to some other O.Henry Award, maybe the Jackson Q. O'Henry Award for Chemistry or the Samuel Soapy Smith O'Henry Award for Physics.